Worth noting that this happened in the wake of a bunch of promises from the state about better treatment, etc. They make a lot of mouth noises about indigenous people but that doesn't mean they are actually interested in doing anything.

Also, at least a few years ago when events in Oaxaca were really, really kicking off, it seemed to me that the Mexican state is absolutely deadly scared of links between non-indigenous leftist movements and indigenous activists, and that this is particularly true when remoter areas are in play, since things get harder and harder for the state to manage.

They don't want to do very much for indigenous people because in general what indigenous people want gets in the way of resource extracting corporations and their client, the state. This is also true in the US, although the more completely developed nature of the country means that indigenous activists are in a different position.

I feel like in a way random white people don't really understand that a lot of indigenous people want what they say they want - like my sense, living in a part of town with lots of native people, is that while sure, people want various kinds of state assistance like healthcare and housing, the fundamental want is to be able to live in some kind of relation to traditional ways, ie, good relationship to the land, able to have family structures that are traditional rather than nuclear-family-in-an-apartment, not so much focus on getting and owning more and more objects, no big polluting projects like pipelines cutting through the backcountry. I feel like white people tend to assume that even if there still are native people, native affect is gone, but this has not been my experience in being around native people. My point is not "oh native people are so wonderful and pure"; it's that colonialism doesn't in fact totally overwrite history and culture and make them vanish.

I feel like the same is true in Mexico, if anything more so because there's a lot more land that is not really controlled by the state and therefore a lot more ability for traditional social structures to persist. People don't want the state running the show, they want their own governing bodies that have some relation to traditional practices; they don't want a lot of resource extraction even if they get cut in on it which they don't, etc. It's hard to buy people off if they don't want what you're offering.

I feel like white people tend to assume that even if there still are native people, native affect is gone

This is especially true in the parts of the Eastern United States that I'm familiar with. I'm very uneducated on this, but in my limited experience, it seems the Mississippi River is an important dividing line. Cross the river and it becomes apparent that the genocide was less complete in the West.

"Cross the river and it becong. mes apparent that the genocide was less complete in the West."

Something I saw, official I think, credited SC and GA with 200 Native Americans each. Andrew Jackson did the job.

Native Americans are only a major factor in a few states (SD, OK, NM) and the story is not always a happy one. A friend of mine comes from a Pine Ridge Dakota family, and his reports are intensely depressing.

Here in OR and in northerm MN there are local pockets of Native Americans, and my tenta tive observation is that while many Americans have positive albeit sentimental feelings about Native Americans, the nearer you are to concnetrations of them the more prejudice you'll find.

The small Pascua Yaqui reservation south of Tucson is where descendants live, I think, of people who fled the Mexican army in the late 19th century. I don't know how much of a link they've kept up with Yaqui in Mexico, compared to the larger Tohono O'odham population whose lands go right up to the border and were very active in fighting the wall.

3.4 That was also my impression on a visit to Saskatchewan in an area with extensive first peoples lands.

I think there's a lot of truth to what Frowner says in 1, though I think she overestimates the extent to which random white people think about indigenous people at all. There's an urban-rural divide or gradient, not so much in people's own priorities and perceptions as in how they relate to the state and what it offers them. I do think it's primarily a both-and thing; most Native people do want autonomy and rights to traditional uses of land, but they also want government services and the material accoutrements of modern American society. The balance between how much of each they're getting depends a lot on where they live. Very few people are getting enough of both.

And the situation is even more complicated and fraught in Mexico, which has its own very long (500 years!) and complex history of relationships between the state and indigenous groups.

Also I was totally going to mention the Yaquis in Arizona but of course lourdes got there first.

3: Official 5-year ACS (Census) estimates of American Indian / Alaska Native population are 37,440 in Georgia (of whom 6,712 Cherokee) and 17,645 in SC.

The lowest, in both absolute terms and as percent of population, is New Hampshire with 2,036.

I've heard Vermont is nicer anyway.

10: Ironically... (More info.)

I've been idly curious about tribal participation, or nonparticipation, in the most recent Mexican elections; I read an article (in Spanish) that made it seem like a wave of absentions were something unusual, but it wasn't totally clear to me. As for Sonoralandia, my understanding is that the Yaqui are not quite as unlucky as Tohono O'odham in this respect, but still have to deal with US border patrol a lot in life, and it sucks.

Growing up in FL, I went to a reservation once as a tourist, but otherwise Native Americans were just characters in picture books to me. I had no framework whatsoever for ongoing discrimination or racism against them (other than the FSU mascot, but that's a complicated case), because I virtually never encountered any. When I moved to the Twin Cities, I was in for a huge shock regarding how much racism Native Americans continued to face on a day to day basis, apart from systemic effects and BIA nonsense.

Minivet: I can't argue. I can't even say where I went wrong.

I was just Some Guy on the Internet that time.

Of course I have no idea how the Census Bureau controls for misguided ("my great-grandmother was...") or trollish people who check that box on the survey. Just a few of them in the American Community Survey could bias up.

I guess these days you can check multiple boxes, so hopefully most of those people will also check "white". And at least in the Census form, right after the box for AIAN you're invited to fill in your tribe.

Asses going to asshole on surveys. It used to be there were a few who put down "Native American" because they were born in America and didn't they just blow your mind with a logical paradox.

Of course I have no idea how the Census Bureau controls for misguided ("my great-grandmother was...") or trollish people who check that box on the survey.

They basically don't, and you just have to assume that the numbers are inflated to some unknown degree. Even adding a line for specific tribe just results in suspiciously high numbers of Cherokees.

What's amazing to me about that is how people, like a certain senator, for example, apply what amounts to a one-drop rule. I'm totally onboard with the idea that Indigenous communities ought to explore alternatives to BQ -- maybe extend below 25% for people with bona fide cultural ties (but of course it's up to them) but even if the stories were mostly true, and they aren't, we'd have people privileging a 3% slice of their heritage over the other 97%. Perfectly appropriate in some limited circumstances, imo, but at a certain point, we've got people lying to themselves.

There's a whole nother thread on that.

I have a particularly good link on that subject but maybe I'll send it to heebie as a guest post, since there are a few different avenues of discussion.